Welcome to the Imaginative Education Research Group

This website introduces new theories, principles, and practical techniques for making education more effective. Because engaging students’ imaginations in learning, and teachers’ imaginations in teaching, is crucial to making knowledge in the curriculum vivid and meaningful, we call this new approach Imaginative Education (IE). We show that the imagination is one of the great workhorses of learning, and how it can be used for all ages and skill levels.

The work of The Imaginative Education Research Group is dedicated to showing how learners’ imaginations can be routinely engaged in everyday classrooms. Unfortunately so much of the content of the curriculum is routinely taught as though its natural habitat is a textbook rather than the fears, hopes, and passions of real people that students too commonly find it dull and lifeless, and un-engaging. We believe the ideas, materials, and practices on this website can show how to bring the curriculum to life.

This website is devoted to taking this new conception of education towards everyday practice in schools and other educational institutions, and also developing and improving it in the process.

The Imaginative Education Research Group was founded by Kieran Egan. His vision has inspired thousands of teachers all over the world to reflect upon their daily practices and embrace this new approach to effective education. Kieran Egan and his team of researchers are striving to change education on a global scale.

Conference 2015 FEEDBACK

All the knowledge in the curriculum is a product of someone’s hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity. If we want students to learn that knowledge in a manner that will make it meaningful and memorable, then we need to bring it to life for them in the context of those hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity. The great agent that will allow us to achieve this routinely in everyday classrooms is the imagination.

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Engaging Imagination in Ecological Education

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Testimonials

“IERG . . . is the main project around the world to which we can point which recognizes and celebrates the absolute centrality of imagination in education.”

Chris OrmellEditor of Prospero

“It’s great stuff! I was exposed to it through the article in Educational Leadership and I am now reading the book. It makes so much sense! Thank you for your great work!”

Dave Bell Texas, USA

“When I started to use IE several years ago now, I tried it out in a few lessons here and there, was amazed at the success and then began to look for other areas and subjects in which I could use the Lesson Planning Frameworks and other aspects of the theory.”